Finally, A Day of Rest

Finally, I have a day to rest. It's funny how you dream of the many things you'll do when you finally get some time off and when that day finally comes, all you want to do is sit around and read. So much for sewing, fixing your son's Lego Mindstorm NXT brick, cleaning up your kids' stuff from the last day of school (which was more than a month ago), or transferring those movies from tape to DVD. It all seems to be like just more work.

This day of rest comes after three strenuous weeks of taking on the property management of our local storage condo (an 84-unit collection of personally-owned "garages"). Mind you, this is a fabulous thing, the garage-condo idea. Our stuff is safely tucked away in our own personal storage space. It's a much nicer garage than we'd ever have attached to a residence in a traditional urban environment. And we're surrounded by some very interesting and like-minded characters.

The property management thing came as no surprise, ultimately. The storage condo had been managed by a professional Property Manager (and CPA) in Centennial. Really, a bit too far away from the physical property itself. The owners and the existing Association Board were having tremendous difficulty working with this particular individual and, no doubt, he was having difficulty working with us. So when the time came to elect a new Association Board of Directors, my husband jumped right on that bandwagon.

With a new Board came a new approach to property management. We were going to do it ourselves. And the "we" in that statement meant my husband and myself, at least for the time being. Don't get me wrong, my husband never asked me to participate. I sort of took that on myself.

If you look at our combined skill set, we make a great team. My husband is excellent at all sorts of hand-on tasks that I would never be able to tackle myself. He is also fearless at really taking charge of a task or situation, at meeting the fire department at 4 am to answer a fire alarm call, or simply to pursue the answers to questions he's never had to ask before. I am, however, better at working behind the scenes. I can do those mundane tasks such as billing customers, paying bills, and handling the computer side of the "business".

The timing of this transition from a professional Property Manager to self-management was such that we needed to pay delinquent bills, send out our quarter 3 assessments with a Newsletter that needed to be written, assess the overall "situation" that we'd inherited, and bring the Board up to speed on where we were as an organization. It was a tall order to accomplish in a couple of weeks and it didn't come without its stresses, at least for me.

I think that not enough time has passed yet to view the past 3 weeks with objectivity. It was difficult. It was more difficult than I ever expected, especially for what I thought would be a "good team". We discovered that precise communications is important, but difficult to actually achieve. I can only hope that the next time we go through a cycle of assessments and newsletters, we'll have more time to complete all of the requisite tasks.

I also encountered a conundrum for myself that I have yet to resolve. My personal desire is always to give my best effort towards life. I want to write the best software that I can, I want to create the best Newsletter that I can, I want to provide quality service to others. At the same time, I need to have time to nurture myself selfishly, to sew or to read or whatever. And I can actually put a number on these pursuits: 75% of my time should be spent on "giving my best" and 25% on "self-nurturance". But in the past 3 weeks, I have found that "giving my best" required 100% of my time and self-nurturance was set aside. I found that "giving my best" was becoming a resented effort because of how much time it was consuming. But I was also unable to allow myself to spend any time on self-nurturance because I consider "giving my best" more important than "self-nurturance".

I have yet to really "figure this out". I'd like to be able to say that I now know that I'm no less of a good person when I don't give my all. But I can't say that. Shouldn't we all be giving our best to others? How does self-indulgence add value to our existence, our place in the greater human community? How can we say it's okay to pursue things that only benefit ourselves? This is my conundrum.

Well, Windows Wins

Alas but it seems that QuickBooks Pro 2008 for Windows has beaten out QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac. As much as I wanted to kick the new PC out of the house, QuickBooks for Windows is a far better product than QuickBooks for the Mac and costs the same amount.

I had high hopes for the Mac version. The Mac version is known to lack many features found in the PC version, such as handling payroll, credit card processing, tracking time, allowing for multiple users, creating accountant review copies, etc. I wasn't planning on using any of these features anyway. I figured that what it lacked in features would certainly be made up in a razzle-dazzle user interface. But alas I was wrong. It's not a bad interface, but it's just not that great either. And here was the clincher - I do need the ability to see and manipulate customer transaction summaries. That one function alone is much easier to do on the PC than on the Mac (if at all). So the PC stays. (And I'll have to say, it didn't shutdown unexpectedly once today).

So now if I could only understand what "debit = left column" and "credit = right column" really means...

Just Say No to Vista

I just have to say this. If you're going to use the Windows Vista operating system (yes, with Service Pack 1), proceed at your own risk.

Having recently purchased a PC (a respectable HP Pavilion from Costco) with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system, I have found that the system shuts itself down and restarts randomly. This has happened twice in three days - once while we were doing absolutely nothing and once while we were in the middle of modifying an important QuickBooks file! If you peruse the internet for solutions to this evidently wide-spread problem, you will see a number of skeptical responses in the vein of "surely you were doing something wrong when this happened" or "surely you installed something you shouldn't have to cause this to happen" or "surely you caused your computer to overheat to cause this to happen", etc. I have read enough now to understand that this problem is, in my opinion, a problem with the Vista operating system and not a problem with the user. We all hope that the problem has some kind of logical cause and can be fixed by some logical action. I no longer believe that this is so. The problem is likely complex enough that Microsoft cannot really effectively debug or fix it. So we, the lucky end users, are stuck with an unreliable operating system. Lucky us.

All I can say is use a Mac for as many tasks as you can and use the PC only when you have to.